Irony’s alive and well at the Sun-Times

“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” Marx said it. Now it’s safe to say Conrad Black et al. are living it.

Bloomberg reports:

Sun-Times Media Group Inc., publisher of newspapers in the Chicago area, sued former chairman Conrad Black and three associates to recover some of more than $60 million it paid in legal fees to defend them…. The complaint won’t affect legal fees for civil lawsuits in which the four are named. Sun-Times ‘will continue to advance reasonable fees and expenses’ in connection with civil proceedings, according to the complaint.

Sun-Times spokeswoman Tammy Chase said in a statement, ‘Our lawsuit speaks for itself.’ She declined to comment further.

Meantime, that same Sun-Times Media Group Inc.—the successor company to Hollinger International—continues its months of ferocious cost-cutting and has put its remaining assets on the auction block. Presumably, this is an attempt to raise sufficient lucre to fund its latest corporate incarnation as a litigation machine. That is, a litigation machine aiming to extract recompense from the very men who managed the company into this mess in the first place. And all the while paying their continuing legal fees.